Grain Exchange

The New Year’s Eve dinner party in question has since gone down in our family annals as the Night of the Great Spelt Screw-Up. We were making, or intending to make, farro, an ancient wheat variety that can be cooked risotto-style with broth, butter and Parmesan. Unfortunately there was no farro to be found at the nearby Whole Foods. Blinded by a flash of substitution brilliance, I bought two pounds of spelt from the dry-goods aisle, recalling that I’d heard somewhere that farro was the fancy Italian word for the far-less-fancy-sounding “spelt.”

Spelt, to my eye, didn’t look like farro, and from a stovetop behavioral standpoint, it quickly distinguished itself. In a panic I called my personal farro expert, Jennifer DeVore, explaining I couldn’t find farro so instead I bought. . . . “Oh, no,” she interrupted. “You didn’t buy spelt.” Farro cooks in about 45 minutes; we cooked our spelt for four hours, and even then the result was extremely al dente. We threw in multiple sticks of butter, gallons of stock and $13 worth of grated Parmesan, but the spelt remained stoically flavor-impervious. We served it anyway. Contrary to the claims of Hildegard von Bingen, a 12th-century spelt enthusiast, our guests did not find that eating it “makes the spirit of man light and cheerful.”

Mocked for my farro-equals-spelt assumption, I tried to exonerate myself by proving just how widespread is this misperception. Google “farro (spelt),” and you’ll get 2,100 hits, many for recipes that claim the grains can be used interchangeably. Even my family’s cookbook hero, Suzanne Goin, makes this claim in “Sunday Suppers at Lucques”: “Farro, also known as spelt, is probably my all-time favorite grain.” She cooks hers simply, in parsley and butter, or bulks it up with kabocha squash and cavolo nero. Farro is also wonderful in soups, like the hearty farro-and-kale soup in Sara Jenkins and Mindy Fox’s new cookbook, “Olives & Oranges.” (It’s clearly gaining ground. Recently, 2 of the 17 contestants on “Top Chef” offered dishes containing farro.) But Harold McGee, in “On Food and Cooking,” clarifies that farro is the Italian word for emmer wheat; of spelt, which he calls “remarkable” for its high protein content, he says, “Often confused with emmer (farro).”

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Credit
Lars Klove for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Jill Santopietro.

So there you have it from me and McGee: farro is not spelt. Which still raises the question, How do you eat spelt if the whole-grain version so severely cramps a man’s body and spirit? Whole spelt berries are used (judiciously) as a healthful textural addition to muffins, stuffings and salads. Ground spelt is a popular substitute for wheat flour because of its lower gluten content; although spelt is a type of wheat, some people who suffer from wheat sensitivity can digest it. (Because spelt does contain some gluten, however, those with celiac disease cannot eat it.)

If you have encountered spelt, it has most likely been in the spiritually uninspiring form of those cellophane-wrapped, beige bread products, sold in health-food stores, that taste like wet cardboard. Artisanal bread baked with intensely nutty-tasting whole-grain spelt flour, as is done by Tim Semler and Lydia Moffet of Tinder Hearth Bakery in Brooksville, Me., is much less of a spiritual buzz kill. Baking with whole-grain spelt flour, however, requires commitment; given spelt’s low gluten content, the dough fails to “stand up” like wheat dough, meaning Semler and Moffet have had to experiment with a “high hydration” technique, resulting in a fermented, batterlike dough that must be baked in a pan. The end product, while loaf-shaped, is, when compared with its wheat-flour counterparts, a denser, wetter bread with a tougher crust. The Tinder Hearth loaf has spawned a cult of addicts, of which I am now one. (Moffet also uses whole-grain spelt flour to make pancakes. She insists that they give you a lot more energy and that “you can eat a bunch of them and not feel like you’re going to die.”)

At the Hungry Ghost bakery in Northampton, Mass., run by Jonathan Stevens and Cheryl Maffei, Stevens uses white spelt flour for his bread, that is, whole-grain flour that has been sifted to remove the ground bits of bran, which, Stevens says, act like “glass shards,” slicing the gluten strands and further impeding the standing-up process. “I’ve tried to make friends with whole spelt flour,” he says. “I can’t do it.” White spelt flour is particularly useful when making pizza or pasta dough, crackers and pâte brise. Maffei also prefers the flavor of spelt flour, which she describes as “sweeter, in the family of a caramelized onion. It’s a fruity, savory kind of sweet.”

Spelt could be seen as the miracle grain: it’s easier to digest and easier on the environment (it’s resistant to the pests that attack wheat and is thus easier to grow organically), and it tastes great. Now that artisanal spelt bakers are saving us from what Stevens calls the “bad Wonder Bread” in health-food stores, what’s not to like? Unless, of course, you mistake it for farro.

Heidi Julavits is an editor of the culture magazine The Believer. Her latest novel is “The Uses of Enchantment.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on page MM65 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Grain Exchange. Today's Paper|Subscribe